Godfathers of the Scientific Renaissance
IN THE SUMMER of 1605, five years after Marie de Medicis had left Florence to join her husband King Henri IV of France, Grand Duke Ferdinando I required a temporary tutor for his son Cosimo. The fifteen-year-old Cosimo was a lively, personable young man, but there was no getting away from the fact that he was indolent; although intellectually gifted, he seemed to prefer entertainment to education. The tutor who commended himself most to Ferdinando I was the forty-year-old professor of mathematics at Padua University; this was Galileo, the man who was to become the first great scientist of the modern era.
The family of Galileo Galilei were citizens of Florence who had originated in the Mugello, the mountain valley north of the city that also produced the Medici. Galileo himself was born in Pisa on 15 February 1564, just three days before the death of the eighty-nine-year-old Michelangelo, the last hero of the High Renaissance. This juxtaposition is significant: the vanguard of the Renaissance would now pass from art to science. Galileo’s father Vincenzo was a formative influence on the young scientist and a man of some interest in his own right. He was descended from a noble family of dwindling fortune, had little money, and possessed a combative temperament which would ensure that he remained in this situation. Yet he was also a man of genuine musical talent, playing the lute and writing compositions that involved an unmistakable mathematical ability.
When the Galilei family returned from Pisa to Florence in 1572, Vincenzo was employed at the grand-ducal court in the Palazzo Pitti as a musician. He also renewed an association with the Camerata Bardi musical circle, a group of talented performers and theorists who were given hospitality by the ancient banking family. Vincenzo had his own original ideas about musical theory, and rebelled against the straitjacket of counterpoint, which had been favoured in medieval music; instead, he insisted that music should please the ear in practice, rather than conform to formal mathematical beauty on the page. The freer compositions preferred by Vincenzo and others in Florence at the time were to bring about a renaissance in music.
Most notably, the musicians of Florence were responsible for the birth of opera, which arose from two distinct sources. On the one hand, there was medieval liturgical drama: holy plays enacted publicly at various times in the Church calendar. Quite separate from these were the classical Greek dramas, with their choric interludes, which were revived and staged by the Florentine humanists. When these two forms were combined, the result was opera: non-religious work incorporating music and drama. The term takes its name from the Italian expression opera in musica (work in music); and the settings of these early operas were usually either legendary or mythical, requiring a new freer musical form such as that favoured by Vincenzo Galilei.
The first opera is generally accepted as Dafne, a drama by the Florentine poet Ottavio Rinuccini, which was set to music by the singer and composer Jacopo Peri, who was musical director at the court of the Medici; and this work was performed at the pre-Lenten carnival in Florence in 1598. The text is largely lost, but significantly the oldest surviving opera, a setting of Rinuccini’s Euridice, is known to have been performed at the Palazzo Pitti in 1600. Astonishingly, the Medici seem also to have been godfathers of Renaissance music.
By the turn of the seventeenth century the Renaissance was beginning to make itself felt in a range of increasingly disparate fields. The times were changing, even in the most literal sense: when it was noticed that the seasons were beginning to drift away from their customary position in the ancient calendar, Pope Gregory XIII abandoned the ancient Julian calendar dating from Julius Caesar in 46 BC, and in 1582 introduced a new Gregorian calendar, at a stroke advancing the date by ten days. Yet many remained highly suspicious of such transformations, and as the new calendar was introduced over the years throughout Europe, it provoked riots, with indignant mobs demanding back the ten days that had been robbed from their lives. After centuries of medieval stasis and certainty in so many fields, change was seen by many as a threat and was far from being universally welcomed.
The red-headed young Galileo Galilei was a boisterous rebel who inherited many of his father’s characteristics; but unlike his father, he was also self-confident and quickly convinced of his own brilliance, though quite where this brilliance was to be applied was another matter. At the age of seventeen he returned to the city of his birth to study at the University of Pisa, but soon became disillusioned by what he was expected to study; stale medieval scholasticism was taught by rote – and was expected to be learned as such, to be repeated in exams. There was no room for imagination, independence of thought, new ideas – the Renaissance may have transformed art and architecture, and may have begun to transform much more, but the arid ideas of Aristotle’s natural philosophy still prevailed in the universities.
It was not in Galileo’s nature to suffer fools gladly, and he made no attempt to hide his contempt for his teachers; he would interrupt their lectures by posing ironic questions designed to show them up. Why, for instance, did all hailstones regardless of their size hit the ground at the same speed, when Aristotle said that heavier bodies fell faster than lighter ones? The lecturer would reply that the lighter hailstones evidently fell from lower in the sky, so that they appeared to fall at the same speed. Such explanations were derided by Galileo, but he was making himself few friends; it soon became evident to all, including his fellow students, that he was too clever for his own good. With nothing else to challenge his mind, Galileo began seeking stimulus elsewhere, in the taverns and bordellos of Pisa.
Fortunately, provincial Pisa came to life between Christmas and Easter when the Grand Duke of Tuscany transferred his court to the city, a tradition that had been inaugurated by Grand Duke Cosimo I, in an attempt to draw the cities of Tuscany together and unite the grand duchy. For a brief season, Pisa would become the social hub of the dukedom, with all manner of stimulating entertainment, ranging from music to chariot-racing and lectures on a wide variety of subjects. On one occasion Galileo managed to sneak his way into a private lecture being given by Ostillion Ricci, the court mathematician (a new post introduced by the scientifically sympathetic Cosimo I), Galileo was captivated by what he heard; he had long been intrigued by abstract calculation, but mathematics was dismissed as irrelevant by the university authorities – several years prior to Galileo’s arrival at Pisa, the professor of mathematics had died, but his position would remain unfilled throughout Galileo’s student years.
Galileo soon began to study under Ricci, who introduced him to the Ancient Greek mathematicians, leading him through the proofs and arguments of Euclid and Archimedes. The traditional scholastic arguments taught in the universities looked to authorities such as the writings of Aristotle to confirm the truth of what they said. Galileo was intrigued to learn that the arguments of Euclid used only the irrefutable reason of proof to establish their truth. After Ricci and the court moved back to Florence, Galileo continued studying on his own at Pisa.
Much to the anger of his father, Galileo returned to Florence in 1585 without either a degree or the prospect of a job. Eventually Vincenzo managed to pull a few strings at the grand-ducal court and Galileo secured some occasional lecturing at the Florentine Academy. Then in 1589 he managed to secure the post of professor of mathematics at his old university; this was a curious appointment for someone with Galileo’s qualifications, but here it seems that he benefited from medieval laxity. Another factor may have been the salary, which was just sixty florins a year, less than the income of a shopkeeper; Galileo was outraged when he discovered this, but there was nothing he could do about it, for he desperately needed any money he could get. His aged father could no longer work, and Galileo now had to support the entire family; to provide further income at Pisa he took extra tutoring, but also found time to continue with researches of his own.
These researches were conducted with characteristic flair. According to the celebrated legend, Galileo mounted the leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two objects of differing weight, and in this way demonstrated to the assembled students and professors that both objects fell through space at the same rate, thus contradicting the Aristotelian view that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones. Whether or not this experiment actually took place (and most now think it did not), the anecdote serves as a perfect illustration of how Galileo’s method differed from Aristotelian practice’ Galileo did an experiment to discover the truth, while the Aristotelians believed their truth because that was what was said in the writings of Aristotle. Of course, if two bodies of different weight are dropped from the same height, they will not in fact hit the ground at precisely the same moment. This is because of differing air resistance; and the Aristotelians maintained that this discrepancy proved their point, which forced Galileo to conjecture that the two objects would indeed fall at the same rate if they were dropped in a vacuum. (It would be almost 400 years before Galileo’s conjecture was dramatically vindicated before a huge audience. In 1969, whilst standing on the surface of the moon, the astronaut Neil Armstrong dropped a hammer and a feather; both hit the surface at the same moment, at which Armstrong remarked: ‘You see, Galileo was right.’)
As a result of Galileo’s experiments, he came up with certain laws of motion, such as: ‘When falling, the final velocity of a body is proportionate to the time it has fallen.’ This incorporated a crucial step: Galileo was applying measurement to physics, an innovation that would eventually lead him to conceive of the fundamental notion of ‘force’.
Galileo’s stroke of genius was the application of mathematics to physics; this may seem obvious to us now, but in Galileo’s time these were two separate and seemingly disparate subjects. The moment when maths and physics were combined – giving rise to such notions as measurable force – modern physics was born. Things could be weighed, distances measured, times recorded, all in precise numbers, and this application of mathematical analysis to physical phenomena brought into being the notion of experiment. Such things could only be determined and measured in practice, and this was the beginning of experimental science. Concrete practical experience could be abstracted into numerical and conceptual terms, results could be recorded, then compared with other results recorded under similar conditions, and in this way general laws could be formulated. The name Galileo gave to such practical tests was cimento, which in Italian means ‘ordeal’; similarly, the word we use today – experiment – derives from an Old French word meaning ‘to put on trial’. Galileo’s insight and practice laid the basis of modern science; it was he who said: ‘The book of Nature is written in mathematical language. Its characters are triangles, cubes and other geometrical figures, without whose help . . . one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.’
Fig 19 Galileo Galilei
In Ancient Greek times, there had been inklings of this, and Pythagoras had even stated: ‘The world is made of number.’ But he had not envisioned this in practical terms; Galileo was the first to apply mathematics in this fashion, and in doing so he discovered an entirely new way to understand the world. The Renaissance in the fields of ancient philosophy and art had given rise to the self-confidence and beliefs of humanism; the Renaissance of ancient science showed how this humanism could realise itself in practical application. Renaissance humanism had created a new way of seeing ourselves, Renaissance science would create a new way of seeing the world.
Galileo soon became a popular figure at Pisa, with the students idolising their rebellious and rumbustious young lecturer, though with the authorities it was another matter. Most of the other lecturers at Pisa were friars, and in Galileo’s publicly expressed opinion the ideas of his friar colleagues were as mediocre as they were orthodox. He had similar contempt for academic dress, refusing to wear a gown, and even composed a student ditty to express his view:
Only wear gowns
if you’re a dim-wit who frowns,
it’s the uniform for schools
who have to obey rules;
not allowed in the bordello
if you’re that sort of fellow . . .
Inevitably the Pisan authorities soon grew tired of their disruptive young colleague, and in 1592 Galileo was told to seek employment elsewhere. Fortunately, the chair of mathematics at the prestigious University of Padua had fallen vacant, and Galileo applied. By now his scientific work had begun to attract the attention of several important scientifically minded figures throughout Italy, and his renown was even brought to the attention of Grand Duke Ferdinando I, who referred to him as ‘one of Tuscany’s finest mathematicians’. Aided by this recommendation, Galileo was accepted for the post at Padua, in the republic of Venice.
Galileo was soon enjoying himself at Padua, where his salary was the equivalent of 500 florins a year. As disrespectful of convention as ever, he set up house with a fiery young mistress called Marina Gambia, by whom he would eventually have three children. His researches were soon producing equally unorthodox results. It was during this period that Galileo began corresponding with the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who was living in Prague. Galileo confessed to Kepler that he believed Copernicus’s theory about the earth and the planets circling the sun, but was afraid to admit this in public for fear of becoming a laughing stock, as his colleagues at Padua remained almost exclusively Aristotelians. In fact, although Galileo did not realise it, Kepler was by this stage both confirming and improving upon Copernicus’s heliocentric idea. Making use of the most accurate astronomical observations available in this pre-telescopic age, Kepler was coming to the conclusion that the planets passed around the sun in elliptical orbits, rather than the circular ones suggested by Copernicus.
In 1604 Galileo noticed that a new star had appeared in the sky; this was in fact a nova (an exploding star), only the second of its kind to appear since 134 BC. The arrival of this star caused great consternation amongst orthodox thinkers, for according to Aristotle there could be no such thing as a new star, any more than an old one could disappear. Aristotle had taught that the earth consisted of four elements (earth, air, fire and water), while the heavens were separate from the earth and consisted of ‘quintessence’, the fifth element or essence, the finest of them all, which was perfect and unchangeable. Objects such as comets, which seemed to contradict this view, were ingeniously explained away as not belonging to the heavens at all; they existed in the sub-lunar region closest to the earth, and were thus meteorological events and not stars.
Never one to shirk an argument, Galileo began a series of lectures on this new star, pointing out how it disproved Aristotelian notions about the heavens. As a result he became involved in a public feud with Cesare Cremonini, the professor of philosophy at Padua. Cremonini maintained the orthodox Aristotelian view that physical laws and measurements only applied on earth; they did not apply to the heavens above the earth, which contained all the planets and stars. Being composed of quintessence, these were unchanging and not subject to the same laws as applied to earth, air, fire and water. When measurements of the heavens were made, they only appeared to contradict the laws of Aristotle; in fact, they did nothing of the sort, because such laws were simply inapplicable in this realm. Galileo was frustrated by his inability to deny such arguments on his own terms – he could provide no experimental scientific proof that they were wrong. He was unaware that Kepler was doing just this, as he calculated mathematically the elliptical orbits of the planets, thus demonstrating that mathematics applied to the heavens, just as it did to earth.
By now the ambitious Galileo was becoming impatient; already he was forty, but somehow the fame and fortune that he felt to be his due continued to elude him. Even Cremonini’s salary was double his, and others had made a name for themselves without displaying half his originality. Galileo had conceived of all manner of original ideas; he had even produced a number of ingenious inventions – including agricultural devices, military machines and medical instruments – but none of them brought success. After he had done all the work, others simply purloined his ideas and made money out of them. Yet every day his need for money became greater; he now had to support a mistress and three children, to say nothing of his family back in Florence – and his debts were mounting.
As a last resort, Galileo decided to write to Grand Duke Ferdinando I of Tuscany, asking for an official post at court. His letter arrived at an opportune moment, for Ferdinando required a tutor during the summer months for his fifteen-year-old son and heir Cosimo. Galileo was appointed, and took up residence with his young charge in the Medici villa at Pratolino in the hills outside Florence. Here he spent a pleasant few months, living a life of ease and luxury, at the same time endearing himself to his young charge with his exciting scientific experiments and brilliant ideas. But then the summer was over, and it was back to Padua and his creditors.
In 1609 Galileo was once again commissioned by the Medici family, but this time it was Ferdinando I’s wife, the Grand Duchess Christina, who required his services. Unfortunately she was under the impression that Galileo was a renowned astrologer, rather than a renowned astronomer, and asked him to cast her husband’s horoscope. Ferdinando I was seriously ill: she wanted to know if he would survive this illness, and if so how long he would live. Galileo had no wish to fall from favour and set to work at once, producing a highly optimistic horoscope; he assured the grand duchess that according to the stars all boded well for Ferdinando I, who would soon recover from his illness and live for many years to come. In the event, Ferdinando I died within the week; the prospects of further employment by the Medici seemed bleak.
That same year word reached Galileo in Padua of a new invention: this was the telescope, which had been developed in Holland. Before he had even seen a telescope, Galileo quickly grasped the principle behind what was essentially a two-lensed tube, and immediately produced his own version, which was more than ten times more powerful than any previous telescope. With some political astuteness, he then donated his new ‘invention’ to the Doge of Venice. The immense importance of the telescope to a sea power such as Venice was quickly realised; it meant that invading ships could be detected on the horizon, giving the city valuable extra hours in which to prepare its defences. The grateful doge extended Galileo’s professorship at Padua for the rest of his life, though unfortunately the extra cash he was hoping for did not materialise: he still remained saddled with debts.
Galileo had quickly seen how to make a better telescope, and eventually he would make one thirty-two times more powerful than the original. More importantly, he quickly realised how to make better use of this magnifying instrument, raising it to the night sky, where to his amazement he saw a new universe opening up before him. It was like Columbus discovering an entirely unsuspected continent, and soon Galileo was making a series of sensational discoveries.
Essentially, nothing new had been discovered about the heavens for around three and a half millennia; astrological observation by the naked eye had been taken to its limit by the ancient Babylonians standing atop their ziggurats plotting the patterns of the stars. The moment Galileo raised his telescope to his eye and focused it on the moon, everything changed. Previously the moon had appeared to be nothing more than a radiant disc, which waxed and waned; now it became transformed into a large and mysterious spherical body. Instead of waxing and waning in size, it was seen to be a sphere divided into light and shadow; upon closer inspection it became clear that the surface of this sphere contained craters, mountains and even what appeared to be seas. Galileo knew that this marked the final demise of Aristotelian astronomy: the heavenly bodies were certainly not perfect spheres created out of unchanging quintessence – they were entirely new worlds, with all the imperfections and features of the one inhabited by humanity.
Galileo described his discoveries in a book he entitled The Starry Messenger, which he dedicated hopefully to his former pupil, who had now succeded as Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany. Galileo’s book would cause a sensation throughout Europe; amongst his many discoveries was the fact that Jupiter had satellites, and in honour of the book’s dedicatee, Galileo christened these new moons Sidera Medicae (The Medici Stars). The Medici were now immortalised in the heavens! More significant in scientific terms was Galileo’s observation of the ‘phases of Venus’: the planet waxed and waned in precisely the same way as the moon. Its surface, as viewed from the earth, moved from shadow into light, and then back again. This was incontrovertible evidence that Venus, as well as the earth, orbited the sun; there could be no other possible explanation of such a phenomenon.
Galileo also observed the sun (using smoked glass to protect his eyes), and found that it had black spots, which took on all kinds of shapes ‘like clouds’ that ‘appeared to consume themselves’. Here was further proof that the heavens were not timeless and changeless, as Aristotle had claimed. Inevitably Galileo’s observations provoked fierce opposition from many Aristotelians and members of the Church. The most characteristic observation came from a Bavarian abbot who declared: ‘I have read all the works of Aristotle and have found nothing resembling what you describe . . . Your spots on the sun are defects of your optical instruments or eyes.’ Ominously, it was impossible for Galileo to contradict such critics, for the reason that they simply did not recognise his point of view.
Galileo’s response was equally characteristic: the Aristotelians, the Church, his enemies, his creditors – they were all in league against him. As his ideas became more far-reaching and original, so did his paranoia. His replies to his critics became increasingly implacable and dismissive; Galileo was making himself more and more enemies in important places.
But The Starry Messenger also brought success, for the nineteen-year-old Grand Duke Cosimo II was flattered that his former tutor had remembered him, and honoured Galileo in generous fashion. He immediately offered Galileo the post of ‘first philosopher and mathematician’ in Tuscany; the job carried a handsome salary and included luxurious accommodation at the Villa Bellosguardo on a hill south of Florence, ideally situated for making astronomical observations. Galileo left Padua at once, bringing with him his three children; his mistress Marina was abandoned in Padua, apparently by mutual consent – though Galileo did leave her with a suitable dowry so that she could get married, which she did a year later.
This period would prove to be the apex of Galileo’s life; it would also represent the height of Medici influence on the scientific Renaissance. Here the Medici were becoming godfathers of a new scientific age, and under their patronage and protection Galileo was able to extend his scientific researches unhindered by his critics. In direct consequence, news of his discoveries would spread and be absorbed by intellectuals throughout Europe. In Holland, the philosopher and mathematician René Descartes would begin a study of Galileo’s work, which inspired him to write his ground-breaking Discourse on Method, in which he outlined a rational and scientific method of thought for the discovery of truth, providing the philosophical basis for all that Galileo had begun.
Galileo now launched himself into a programme of unhampered research, at the same time embarking on a series of wide-ranging theoretical speculations. His ideas on the close relationship between mathematics and physics led him to make a distinction between two different qualities of objects. First there were those physical qualities that could be measured, such as length, weight and so forth; these belonged to the objects themselves. Then there were qualities that could not be measured, such as the smell of an object, its colour and its taste; these did not belong to the objects themselves, but were the impressions caused by the objects on the people who observed them. This crucial distinction would later be taken up by the English philosopher John Locke, and would form the basis of his philosophy of empiricism, the first genuinely scientific philosophy, which stated that all truth must be based on experience.
The philosophies of Descartes and Locke would bring about a revival in philosophical thought, and are generally recognised as the beginning of modern philosophy. Both of these philosophies – the rational and the empirical – owe a crucial debt to Galileo, who in turn relied so heavily on Medici patronage and protection. Galileo himself would also bring about the renaissance of an ancient philosophical idea that would transform science, rather than philosophy. As a result of his experiments, Galileo began speculating on the ultimate nature of matter, and this led him to revive an idea first proposed by the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus in the early fourth century BC. Democritus had stated that all matter ultimately consisted of indivisible entities, which he called ‘atoms’ (a word that comes from the Greek atomos, meaning uncuttable, or indivisible). In time, this idea would permeate physics and chemistry, putting paid to the ancient Aristotelian idea that all matter consisted of a mixture of earth, air, fire and water.
Although it would be many centuries before atoms could actually be observed or counted, this idea goes to the very heart of the new scientific revolution. Atoms, as individual entities, are theoretically able to be counted, whereas a mixture of earth, air, fire and water is a matter of qualities, rather than numbers. The new scientific revolution was shifting from a qualitative world to a quantitative world, one where mathematics could be applied.
Galileo began pondering the implications of the new heliocentric theory, and speculated that the inertial path of a planet around the sun must be caused by some form of magnetic force between the two objects. His papers reveal that he was on the brink of formulating a notion similar to that of gravity, and of conceiving of this a universal force that applied throughout the heavens. Galileo’s application of physics to the motion of the planets was an epochal step; Kepler had applied mathematics to the universe, and now Galileo showed that the earth’s laws of physics were also universal. Boldly he declared: ‘Earthly laws apply in the heavens.’
By now he was treading on dangerous ground, and the Vatican authorities were beginning to take an increasing interest in Galileo’s revolutionary new ideas. But there was no stopping him. In 1611 he was invited to the papal court to demonstrate his new telescope, and his ideas made a surprisingly favourable impression. Emboldened by this, Galileo decided to reveal the full extent of what he had discovered, demonstrating once and for all the truth of the heliocentric solar system. He wrote a book describing sun spots; he exploded the idea that the earth was the centre of the universe; and he showed how science could explain the heavens. His book was soon being distributed throughout Europe, and its ideas started to catch on amongst students at the universities.
The Aristotelians began to see the enormity of the threat posed by Galileo, and belatedly mounted a devastating counter-attack. They pointed out that Galileo’s Copernican ideas not only contradicted the teachings of the Church, but also flatly denied what was written in the Bible. The Church decided it was time to act: Galileo’s ideas were undoubtedly heretical.
Yet even at this late stage Galileo still had his friends and advocates amongst the Church hierarchy. Popes and cardinals had played their part in furthering the ideas of the Renaissance, and many powerful figures in the Church remained sympathetic to consequent intellectual progress. (Tellingly, the magnificent new dome of St Peter’s – the pride of the Catholic Church, which had been completed twenty years earlier – had been understood as a product of art and science.) Amongst those interested in the latest scientific ideas was a fellow Florentine, the influential Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who informed Galileo that as long as he limited himself to speaking purely as a mathematician, he would not get into trouble. This advice was unwittingly ironic, for the Church regarded mathematics in the Platonic sense, as essentially an idealistic and abstract matter, which had no relevance to the real world; Galileo’s major scientific insight had been to recognise the contrary.
With hindsight, this conflict between the Church and science can be seen in context: it was both historically inevitable, and in an intellectual sense utterly unnecessary. Its origins lay in the part Christianity had played in preserving Western civilisation. During the Dark Ages after the collapse of the Roman Empire, ancient knowledge had survived only in remote Christian communities. With the coming of more settled times in the medieval era, this knowledge had spread throughout the countries of western Europe, but had remained the preserve of the Church. This process had reached its apotheosis in the comparative intellectual stasis of the high medieval era, when the Church had still regarded all philosophy, all knowledge, all learning as its own: knowledge and the teachings of the Church were one. With the revival of intellectual enquiry prompted by the Renaissance, the Church found itself in a difficult position. Unwilling to relinquish its monopoly on knowledge, the Church decreed that any new knowledge must agree with its teachings, which meant paradoxically that the new discoveries of science were acceptable to the Church only when they were the same as what was already known! Progressive thought was harnessed to static intellectual practice, and as the tension built up it was inevitable that something would give; Galileo’s misfortune was to find himself at the centre of this increasingly destructive process.
In 1616 the Church placed the works of Copernicus on the Index of banned books, and Galileo was warned that he must not ‘hold or defend’ such ideas, or he would be brought before the Inquisition. This body had been set up as part of the Counter-Reformation that was now actively combating all opposition to the Catholic Church. The aim of the Inquisition was to seek out heresy, by means of torture if necessary; in this way, any seeds of Protestantism in Catholic territories would soon be eliminated.
Desperately Galileo wrote letters to Cardinal Barberini, the Grand Duke of Tuscany and other influential friends. To the Dowager Grand Duchess Christina he wrote pertinently: ‘To ban Copernicus now would seem in my judgement to be a contradiction of truth.’ But these pleas were to no avail, and Galileo retired to his villa at Bellosguardo, where he remained under the protection of Grand Duke Cosimo II.
Seven years later Galileo’s friend Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, and Galileo journeyed to Rome filled with optimism to argue his case. Urban VIII remained to a degree sympathetic, and gave Galileo permission to write a book about ‘the systems of the world’. In this he could put forward both the Copernican point of view of the universe and that of the Church, so long as he made it quite clear that the Church’s was the correct one. Galileo now wrote Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which he propounded the Copernican view in the mouth of the witty intellectual character Sagredo, while the Church and its Aristotelian viewpoint was represented by a character called Simplicio. Unfortunately, Galileo once again became carried away, and as a result Simplicio was made to look a little bit too simple. Worse still, many thought they recognised in Simplicio a characterisation of the pope himself. Urban VIII was furious, and his advisers egged him on by insisting that such ideas only served to undermine the entire Counter-Reformation. Europe was now in the midst of the Thirty Years War, involving ruinous conflict between Catholic and Protestant armies throughout the continent; and in the hysteria of the moment Galileo’s ideas were judged to be worse ‘than Luther and Calvin put together’.
Unfortunately for Galileo, his protector and former pupil Grand Duke Cosimo II had died in 1621. With no one to defend him, Galileo was ordered to Rome in 1633 to stand trial for heresy. Only thirty years previously, the philosopher and scientist Giordano Bruno had been similarly charged in Rome, and had ended up being burned at the stake. Galileo realised he was in mortal danger; now sixty-eight years old and in deteriorating health, he made his way to Rome. Faced with the prospect of being tortured by the Inquisition, he soon caved in. He was made solemnly to declare that he ‘abjured, cursed and detested’ his view that the earth moved around the sun, though according to legend he could not help muttering under his breath, ‘But it still moves.’
Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment, but on account of his age and ill health he was allowed to return to Tuscany. Here, under the benign guardianship of the new Grand Duke Ferdinando II, he served his term under house arrest on his small estate at Arcetri just south of Florence. Four years later he began to go blind; but he was far from being the broken man he appeared. His fame ensured that he was visited by several distinguished travellers from northern Europe, including the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the poet John Milton. In the very month before Galileo finally succumbed to complete blindness, he discovered by telescopic observation that the moon oscillated on its axis as it orbited the earth. A short time later he completed his final masterpiece, The Two New Sciences, which summed up his ideas; and the manuscript was smuggled to Holland, where it was published and distributed to scientists throughout Europe. Galileo finally died at the age of seventy-seven on 8 January 1642, just a few months before the birth of Isaac Newton in England; 350 years later the Vatican would finally concede that, in the case of Galileo, ‘errors were made’.
This ‘pardon’ marked a considerable climbdown, for at the time of Galileo’s death the Church was in no mood to forgive his transgressions, and his erstwhile friend Urban VIII remained particularly vindictive. When Grand Duke Ferdinando II ordered that Galileo should be buried in Santa Croce, which contained the tombs of such great Florentine figures as Ghiberti, Machiavelli and Michelangelo, the pope forbade this. Galileo would not to be permitted a Christian burial inside Santa Croce until seventy-five years after his death.
Grand Duke Ferdinando II had taken a keen interest in Galileo’s activities, and after he had come of age and ascended to the dukedom in 1632 there had been regular orders from the Palazzo Pitti to Galileo asking him to procure the most up-to-date telescopes for his highness. Ferdinando II took particular pride in the Medici Stars, which he would proudly show to distinguished visitors through his latest telescope. In 1635, after Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems had been condemned by Urban VIII, Ferdinando II played a significant role in ensuring that this work was preserved and disseminated. He made sure that his younger brother Mattias de’ Medici smuggled a manuscript copy of the work out of Florence to northern Europe, where it was translated and published in several languages. As a result, when Hobbes visited Galileo during his period of house arrest, he was able to inform the ageing scientist that he had seen an English translation of his Dialogue.
So why did Ferdinando II not protect Galileo after the initial publication of the Dialogue in 1632? And why had he allowed the ailing Galileo to be summoned to Rome in fear of his life? Ferdinando II had come to power at the age of ten in 1621, on the death of his father Grand Duke Cosimo II, and during his minority Tuscany had been ruled by the formidable Dowager Grand Duchess Christina and her daugher-in-law, Cosimo II’s wife. At the age of seventeen Ferdinando II had been sent on a tour of European capitals to broaden his education, but even after he assumed full power in 1632 he had remained under the domination of the Dowager Grand Duchess Christina until she died in 1636. At the time of Galileo’s summons to Rome in 1632, Urban VIII had contacted the young Ferdinando II and advised him not to interfere, warning that to do so would provoke a major diplomatic upset. The Dowager Grand Duchess Christina had allowed Tuscany to fall increasingly under papal influence, and Florence witnessed an influx of priests during this period. The many monasteries in Florence, some of which had been almost empty, were now filled to overflowing. Under Christina, priests had been allowed to take up important posts in the administration, an unprecedented development, which had in fact been specifically forbidden by Grand Duke Cosimo I when he extended the permanent bureaucracy.
Ferdinando II was a plump, easy-going young man with flowing dark hair and a dashing winged moustache. Even in his early portrait by Sustermans he cuts a slightly absurd figure, dressed in shining armour, his hand on his sword: a somewhat dandified and unlikely warrior (see colour plates). But his languid, affable exterior masked unexpected abilities, though these remained for the most part latent on account of his laziness. He appeared to treat his duties more as a pastime than as a serious pursuit; yet during his rule Tuscany would manage to maintain the difficult balance between the often conflicting demands of Austria, France, Spain and the pope.
In 1638 Ferdinando II was married to Vittoria della Rovere, with the expectation that they would soon produce a male heir to ensure the Medici succession. Yet this task did not prove so easy; Vittoria della Rovere was a large, prim, domineering woman, but despite her ample physique she found childbearing difficult. Her first son died at birth, and two years later she produced a similarly ill-fated daughter, whose birth almost killed Vittoria. Many began to suspect that there would be no heir, especially when they noticed that Ferdinando II seemed to prefer the company of the handsome young men of the court to that of his overbearing wife. Fortunately this pastime did not distract him entirely from his dynastic duties, and a male heir was born in 1642.
Meanwhile Ferdinando II’s mother Maddalena remained a powerful presence behind the throne, making the morals of Tuscany her particular concern, and the grand duke appeared quite content with this arrangement. However, shortly after the birth of his son, who was christened Cosimo, the Dowager Grand Duchess Maddalena confronted Ferdinando II with a long list of all those holding high office in the grand duchy who were homosexuals. She demanded to know what her son proposed to do about this. Ferdinando II quietly took the list, read the names on it and then added his own. Maddalena refused to be disconcerted, saying that he had only acted in this fashion to save these sinners from the punishment they deserved. Ferdinando II asked her what this punishment was, and she replied that they should all be burned. Whereupon Ferdinando II tossed the paper into the fire and exclaimed: ‘Voilà, your command has already been accomplished.’
This anecdote is indicative, for it shows Ferdinando II’s growing determination beneath his easy-going manner; but perhaps more importantly, it gives a sign of the prevailing moral climate in Florence. Despite the relaxed and more prosperous ambience of the city under the grand dukes, there remained those who wished it otherwise; the forces that had given rise to Savonarola, and the Republic of Christ, might yet be summoned once more.
Like many Medici before him, Ferdinando II enjoyed putting on pageants for the people. Florence still prided itself on its artistic accomplishments, but these were a pale imitation of its greater days; peace and prosperity were somehow not capable of inspiring the genius that the city had produced during times of violence and instability. Even the city’s celebrated taste lapsed – uncertainty had given it edge, while normality required only entertainment and fond memories of the ‘good old days’. This is perhaps best typified by the most popular artist of the period, Luca Giordano. For once, Florence’s favourite was not even a Florentine: Giordano was a Neapolitan, whose talent was firmly allied to his facility. At an unprecedented rate, he turned out copies of paintings by Michelangelo, Raphael and other great Renaissance predecessors. Gone were the days when Florence was an artistic force, and the leading centres of art were now scattered through Europe – in Rome, Paris and Amsterdam. The High Renaissance copied by Giordano was long past, but Florentines preferred his anachronistic fakes to the Baroque style that now prevailed in the leading artistic centres of Europe.
It has been claimed that the Baroque style, with all its melodrama, pathos and love of grandiose gesture, was temperamentally alien to Florentine taste, which preferred clarity of line and classical form. But this view is highly contestable. Florence had produced, and taken to its heart, Michelangelo, whose works were filled with drama and torment and had in fact paved the way for the exaggerations of the Baroque. Florentine taste had evolved from Masaccio to Botticelli through to Michelangelo; but now this glorious fluency of taste had finally petrified. The city’s inability to remain abreast of artistic development was due to a failure of its taste altogether, rather than to any particular blind spot regarding the Baroque style.
Yet not all the art produced during this period in Florence was unoriginal. Ferdinando II’s younger brother, Cardinal Giancarlo de’ Medici, employed the Neapolitan Salvator Rosa, a painter and poet of considerable talent who never quite fulfilled his promise. As opposed to the hindsight of Giordano, Rosa was an artist before his time; some of his poetry, together with his dramatic landscapes and portraits, can now be seen as unmistakable precusors of a Romantic era that had not yet dawned. On his darkly brooding Self-Portrait as a Philosopher he inscribed the words:
Aut tace
Aut loquere meliora
Silentio.
Or speak better than
Silence.)
Unfortunately Rosa himself did not live up to this, producing all manner of ephemeral satirical dramas and paintings of battle scenes to meet popular demand. Reflecting the times and place in which he lived, he seemed uncertain of himself; as an artist he was willing to try anything, and even had a spell as a comic actor. Only a fraction of his work is significant, but this spoke better than the artistic silence of his lesser work and the absence of artistic taste that surrounded him in Florence.
Ferdinando II’s youngest brother Leopoldo would also become a cardinal, but before he left to take up his post in Rome he would inaugurate the last significant flowering of Medici Renaissance patronage, which would be in the scientific sphere. In 1657 Leopoldo de’ Medici founded the Accademia del Cimento, a direct reference to Galileo’s favoured scientific method of cimento (test, or experiment). Leopoldo’s ‘Experimental Academy’ would seek to continue this scientific work; its motto was ‘Try and try again’, and its emblem was a furnace such as those used for assaying metals. The Cimento met at irregular intervals in the Palazzo Pitti, moving to Pisa when the court took up residence there, and its dozen or so enthusiastic participants included Ferdinando II himself.
Experiments were carried out in the palace and in a furnace in the Boboli Gardens. Strictly speaking, the Cimento had no actual members, or rules; it simply consisted of those who participated in its informal meetings. These participants passed on their findings in correspondence with scientists throughout Europe; at the time this was the only way in which news of the latest scientific discoveries was disseminated. During the Renaissance various societies had come into existence for the furtherance of philosophical, literary and theological discussion, but it was not until the seventeenth century that exclusively scientific societies were formed. The first of these appeared in Italy, with the Accademia dei Lined (lynxes) being founded in Rome in 1603. Galileo had been invited to become a member in its inaugural year, and at one of their meetings it was decided that his occhiale (eyeglass) should be named a ‘telescope’. But after the condemnation of Galileo, the Lincei was disbanded. The founding of the Accademia del Cimento in 1657 was thus a brave move, as well as a pioneering one. The Royal Society in London was not founded until 1662, with the Académie des Sciences in Paris following four years later, and the Berlin Academy opening in 1700.
But the Cimento was more than just a loosely conducted club for aristocratic amateur scientists interested in the latest developments; amongst its active members was Evangelista Torricelli, the great Italian physicist. In 1641 the thirty-three-year-old Torricelli had journeyed to Florence to take up the post of Galileo’s assistant, a rare accolade indeed; and on the death of Galileo the following year, Torricelli was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Florence.
In 1643 Torricelli investigated an idea first put to him by Galileo. He took a U-shaped tube sealed at one end and filled it with mercury; this was then inverted, with its open end placed in a bowl of mercury. The mercury flowed into the bowl, but only so far, causing a space to appear at the sealed end of the tube. This was a vacuum, and Torricelli was the first to produce a stable vacuum in this way. Whilst studying this vacuum, Torricelli noticed that the height of the mercury varied from one day to the next. He concluded that this was due to changes in the air pressure – he had invented the first barometer.
Not all ideas produced by members of the Cimento were of such exceptional calibre, yet even some of its apparently more whimsical ideas were pursued with enthusiasm. Ferdinando II continued the family interest in biology started by his great-grandfather Cosimo I, and developed an interest in exotic animals; as a result he decided to import some camels from India, which were initially kept in the Boboli Gardens. Ferdinando II was convinced that the patience and endurance of the camel made it a superior pack animal to the mule, and intended to introduce camels into the local haulage trade. To the delight of the locals, camels were soon observed on highways throughout Tuscany, although it eventually had to be conceded that these were more of an exotic curiosity than a commercial practicality. The idea may have failed, but the camels themselves did not, and evidence of this doomed enterprise would persist until well into the twentieth century in the form of a herd of around 200 camels in the grand-ducal park at San Rossore on the coast near Pisa.
Ferdinando II was determined that his son Cosimo should be given a scientific education, but this was vetoed by the Grand Duchess Vittoria, who regarded science as heretical. Instead Vittoria insisted that her son should receive a strictly religious education. This proved an unwise choice, as it only served to accentuate the young boy’s inclination to pious melancholy – an inclination that deepened during his adolescence into an unhealthy fixation with Christian martyrs. Ferdinando II was somewhat disturbed by this, but chose not to interfere; his preference for the quiet life invariably overrode any other considerations. Many saw this as evidence of an inherent weakness of character, and on some occasions there is no denying that Ferdinando exhibited this flaw. His abandonment of Galileo in his time of need, for instance, as well as his unwillingness to prevent the descent of his son into religious morbidity, are difficult to view as anything other than failures of character. Yet in the larger scheme of things, Ferdinando II’s overwhelming desire for the quiet life would prove of benefit to Tuscany. During the course of his long reign – which would last just a year short of half a century – Tuscany saw little of war. However, these years were not entirely untroubled, and the opening of Ferdinando II’s reign was beset by natural disasters.The complete failure of the harvest in 1621, after three years of bad harvests, brought Florence close to starvation; and during the three years up to 1633 the city suffered from outbreaks of plague that accounted for almost 10 per cent of the population. Ferdinando II’s personal appearance distributing charity in the badly hit Santa Croce district during this period gained him early popularity.
From then on he presided as a benign despot, ruling over a grand duchy that gradually settled into a long, slow economic decline, as cheap foreign competition began to undercut the local cloth and silk industries. But there were compensations: Florence now began to receive its first tourists on a regular basis. In northern Europe, the spread of Renaissance art and ideas had resulted in a revival of interest in classical Rome and the Italian Renaissance. As part of their education, rich young men would now be sent to Italy on the Grand Tour, and Florence – with its Renaissance architecture, public statues and art treasures – became a traditional stopover on the way south to Rome.
During the reign of Ferdinando II, Tuscany would be involved in just one military campaign, when Pope Urban VIII occupied the small quasi-independent state of Castro on Tuscany’s southern border in 1641. Ferdinando II put out cautious diplomatic feelers, and was informed that neither Spain nor France would intervene if he acted. So in 1643 Ferdinando II donned his shining armour and led a numerous but somewhat ragtag army of volunteers and mercenaries to Castro, where the papal forces were quickly put to flight. The citizens of Florence rejoiced, but were less pleased when it was discovered that paying for the army had left the grand duchy’s exchequer all but empty. The grand duchy could no longer afford to pay interest on its government bonds, which accounted for the savings of many citizens, great and small. It seemed likely that the grand duchy would go bankrupt, but the expected rush to sell government bonds did not materialise; the economy was now so slow that there was simply nothing else in which it was worth investing. Out in the country, the consequent lack of currency was overcome by a resurgence of the barter system for paying agricultural wages, whilst in the city the growing influx of tourist money enabled the economy to continue ticking over.
By this stage much of the Medici family’s income came from church benefices; and during this time of need, Ferdinando II established a number of charities to provide for the unemployed. The money extracted from the poor in church collection plates was thus returned to them. But the Medici family fortunes inevitably suffered, for their finances were identified heavily with the state. Lorenzo the Magnificent may have dipped into the city exchequer to finance his extravagant entertainments, but Ferdinando II had no need to resort to such pilfering of public funds, as the grand duchy’s exchequer was his exchequer. This meant, for instance, that the ongoing additions to the Pitti Palace were carried out by public works, rather than by privately hired contractors. Long gone were the days when the Medici relied upon the family bank for their income, and it was during this period that Ferdinando II finally wound up the last of the Medici banking activities; the Medici were aristocrats, joined to the royal houses of Europe, and had no wish to be reminded of their origins in commerce.
In a brave attempt to get the economy restarted, Ferdinando II sponsored a number of public-works programmes, the most ambitious of which was an extensive new building project at Livorno, which was in desperate need of new housing. As a result of Cosimo I’s freedom-of-worship decree, the port had expanded to become a thriving cosmopolitan city – to the point where in 1634 a British consulate was opened in Livorno, whose mellifluous name was vandalised in English to become Leghorn. The city had begun attracting all manner of traders, religious refugees, itinerant tradesmen, sailors, deserters, escapees from the galleys and other outlaws. Its trade was free from taxation, but it indirectly generated considerable income for the grand duchy in the form of the many ancillary trades that grew up around the port. On the other hand, the city had also gained the unsavoury reputation of being the main slaving port of the northern Mediterranean. The English diarist John Evelyn, visiting Livorno in 1644, saw ‘such a concourse of slaves, Turks, Moors and other nations that the number and confusion is prodigious; some buying, others selling, others drinking, others playing, some working, others sleeping, fighting, singing, weeping, all nearly naked and miserably chained’. As part of Ferdinando II’s public policy, new houses were now laid out beside the canals in the district that became known as New Venice; meanwhile undesirables were rounded up and deported to Algiers.
During his fifties, Ferdinando II began to suffer increasingly from dropsy, also becoming prone to fits of apoplexy. In 1670, at the age of fifty-nine, he was forced to take to his bed, where he received the finest medical treatment available at the time. As reported by an eyewitness: ‘The Grand Duke’s medicine did not work, so his physician bled him, and extracted a further ounce of the stone from his bladder . . . Later a cauterising iron was placed to his head, but to no avail, and powder was inserted in his nostrils . . . [Then] four live pigeons were ripped open and applied to his forehead.’ Not surprisingly, he soon died. Ferdinando II had not been loved, but the citizens of Florence had grown used to his benevolent autocratic rule, and his passing was widely – if not deeply – mourned.